Healthcare providers, such as physicians, druggists, nurses, and even the patient himself or herself have only a limited view of health-related information pertaining to that patient which is necessary to make properly informed decisions. One limitation is the unavailability of the full range of data needed at a given time to make a fully informed medical decision. Another limitation is the inability to track data between different providers or between different visits to the same provider. For discussion, a visit is any contact with anyone in the chain of healthcare provision, including payors, claims processors, laboratories or pharmacists.
By way of example, assume a person visits a doctor with a particular problem. The doctor (assuming it's the patient's regular doctor) will know about chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, etc. of that patient. But what the doctor does not know is whether the patient has filled the last Rx and if he/she has, taken the medicine regularly. The healthcare provider may or may not know what other healthcare providers may have prescribed, and may or may not have lab test results ordered by other providers. Thus, when treatment is rendered it is done so without access to a wide body of knowledge pertaining to the patient.
Another problem with the scenario discussed above is that when the provider does make a decision on treatment, he/she then tells the patient to go off and do something and to call if there is a problem. Unless the patient calls with a problem, the provider does not have any insight into what is happening to the patient. This is not a prudent way to manage a person's health and is particularly troublesome when the patient has a chronic illness.